I have put a fair amount of effort trying to report a pciide bug with the Via sata controller (emulates ide) to the OpenBSD developers without much luck. When I look at the nabble mailing list there are 3 pages of bug reports intermixed with a significant quantity of spam. It is reminiscent of the old bsdforums.

The messages that have more than 1 post are "bumps" by the original poster. Can't find one that a developer has responded to. The developers seem to shift their focus at times ie openports.se showed a flurry of activity but has been quiet as of late. Given that 4.9 is being mailed from the CD replicators, the release push should be over and to me it seems a good time to begin addressing issues for 5.0

I like the simplicity of OpenBSD but development is becoming more of a developers Cathedral than an Opensource Bazaar. That will have consequences. Anyway my 2 cents.

Shep, if you use sendbug(1) to report your bug, a structured problem report is sent to gnats@, which is the problem reporting database tracking tool program, and that will assign a PR number if it receives a formatted report. The bugs@ mailing list is sent a copy, and followup discussions may inadvertently occur there, but it is not used for reporting bugs directly.

If you just post to bugs@, your report will not be assigned a number, and will likely get lost in the noise.

That said, having a PR number is not a guarantee of immediate attention.

----

Edited to add: I've just looked at bugs@ and see what I think are your two posts there, on March 8 and again on April 19. They did not go through sendbug, so may not be seen by the appropriate developer(s).

Jiggimi;
The problem occurs during installation and the system goes tu before I can generate a dmesg (no null modem cable) or activate sendbug. I'll research sendbug to see if I can utilize it on a working system and paste the relevant info into sendbug. Looked at your link, I'll use the sendbug -D option so the report does not get littered with information not pertinent to the problem.

They have no obligation to fix bugs, so, you'll have to do your best to provide as much information as you can.. verbose/debug pcidump/lspci output for the device, links to datasheets/specifications if they exist and you can find them.

Indeed, you can use sendbug(1) on another system to assemble and send your bug report.. if the system doesn't have mail configured properly, you'll need to provide another address for them to respond.

It is technically possible to send mail to gnats@ manually, but it should be in the format produced by sendbug.. and you need to be sure your mailer won't mangle lines or anything, no need for a subject on the message as the server will generate one itself.